How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [2]
So what does all this mean? Why do I still yearn for the paradise of my youth, created mostly by closeted gay men? This early utopian vision of a world where everything was “nice” and “interesting,” and never dull, has had a lasting effect on my adult choices. Because I was exposed to the homosexual aesthetic at an early age, I’ve never wanted to live anywhere without gay men. I enjoy being in a world where foreign cinema, tropical floral arrangements, and provocative finger foods are considered life necessities. Why wouldn’t I? The straight male aesthetic often features beer and Barca loungers.
Without the artful influence of gay men, our American landscape can seem like a wasteland, like one giant Wal-Mart, or Disney World. Would I want my daily life to resemble a bad version of Superbowl Sunday? It’s too frightening to contemplate.
I’ve come to realize that my upbringing was a tad unusual for the times. If the topic of male homosexuality was never overtly discussed, it was at least implied in my household. I was exposed to a raft of unspoken positive queer stereotypes. Gay men were creative, interesting, and talented. The men who lived together or alone, who were my father’s age but had no wives, had the time and money to create flair and style. My father, a beleaguered breeder, might have been wearing dorky straight plaid pants and Hush Puppies, but he got to eat in gay restaurants and attend gay theater productions.
Yet one needn’t have lived in a partially gay community to have benefited enormously from the homosexual influence in the last five decades. The gay sensibility has always shaped heterosexual culture, a fact that the straight community is only now beginning to notice and admit.
Fifties housewives swooned over Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson without knowing that they were falling in love with men who epitomized the gay aesthetic—falling in love, really, with a homosexual ideal represented in a heterosexual context. These same women bought clothes by gay designers and had their hair done by gay hairdressers. They fell in love to romantic songs composed by homosexuals. They devoured fashion magazines staffed by gay photographers and advice columnists working under female pseudonyms.
Straight people took to the soup can, Andy Warhol’s pop manifesto. They were fascinated by his postmodern take on ordinary objects. How many of them even knew he was gay? I didn’t.
Looking back, I can see how America fought hard to ignore the gay undertow of our culture from the fifties well into the eighties. There were so many unanswered questions. Why was Paul Lynde the funniest guy on Hollywood Squares? Why were Liberace ’s clothes and jewels the most fabulous? Why were Johnny Mathis ballads the favorite make-out music for heterosexual couples in the sixties? Why were many of the greatest playwrights of the last half of the twentieth century—Tennessee Williams, Lanford Wilson, Terrence McNally, Edward Albee—all gay men writing for straight audiences? Why are Cole Porter’s love songs the cleverest and most poignant?
Back then we were struggling, as a culture with too many closets, to ignore the idea that many of our modern notions about art, romance, theater, cinema, fashion, food, and life itself were shaped by gay initiatives and perspectives.
Fortunately, we no longer need to be in denial. We’re in a golden age of “Global Queering,” in which ideas and behaviors associated with gay groups are constantly making their way into mainstream culture, whether it’s a newly popular mixed drink (think martinis and cosmopolitans), a